food guide - how to cook and prepare food on a camping trip
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FOOD REQUIREMENTS:
Your body needs all those calories just to keep warm. Add to that the exertion of moving about in a winter environment, and you can easily consume 5,000 a day. Fats are the most concentrated form of calories, though they won’t get you far without carbos.
Here’s a sample daily menu from a trip I took a couple of years ago. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it now, but I still use it as a starting point. At the time I made this, I was pretty broke. Now I might add some freeze-dried food to the list... On the other hand, I quite honestly might not. We’ll see how it goes.
Breakfast: Oatmeal, 2 packs
Peanut Butter, 2 Tbsp.
Lunch: Granola Bars, 2
Jerky, 2 oz.
Chocolate, 1 ½ oz.
Peanut Butter, 2 Tbsp.
Dinner: Egg Noodles, 4 oz.
Potatoes (mashed, dried), 2/3 cup
Pemmican, 4 oz.
Cheese, 3 oz.
Snacks: Hot Chocolate, 8 packs
Chocolate, 3 oz.
Peanut Butter, 4 Tbsp.
Raisins, ½ cup
Note: spices/bouillon not included.
That gives you 4461 calories, 513g carbohydrate, 197.5g fat, and 139g protein (by comparison, the U.S. Government recommended "Daily Values" are: 2000 calories, 300g carbohydrate and 65g fat). Eat like this at home, and use the money you save to buy a triple bypass.
You’ll notice breakfast is pretty light. I’m not a breakfast person. Yes, I agree you need to fuel up for the day (with 2 cups of hot chocolate, it’s still only 540 calories), but I can’t eat a lot when I get up. It makes me sick. So, I’d say that breakfast could -- and probably should -- be bulked up. Add another bowl (2 packs) of oatmeal, add some butter, something like that. For myself, I’ll gag down what I can and eat more later.
Like I said, I was poor. A little money could go a long way toward increasing the calorie intake, and adding some more variety as well as more complex carbos.
The one thing I get very sick of, very quickly, is chocolate. Even the oatmeal tastes good longer than the chocolate does. I find adding peanut butter helps the Hershey bars go down easier.
FOOD NO-NO’S:
ALCOHOL: Don’t. The popular theory is that alcohol keeps you warm. It actually does stimulate blood flow to the extremities, but it does so at the expense of your body core, and you can easily become hypothermic.
FOODS TO EAT:
(HINT: food = fuel. Forget about subtle blends of flavors and French-Asian influences. The idea in winter camping is to calculate what combination of how many calories you’ll need, then make it palatable enough so you’ll actually eat it. If you don’t make it palatable enough, force yourself to eat it anyway.)
PEMMICAN: a mixture of dried meat and fat. Mmm-mmm good. American Indian in origin, originally made with a 50/50 meat/fat mixture, sometimes augmented by dried berries for flavor. My own mixture is 60% shredded beef jerky (a food processor is helpful) and 40% lard. Shred the jerky, melt the lard, mix them together in a bowl and pack about 4 ounces into a plastic-lined form (tuna tins work well), then refrigerate. When it’s cool and hard, dip the tins into hot water to loosen it, pull it out of the tin, and wrap the excess plastic over it. Keep it in the freezer. Lasts indefinitely. Tastes like crap at home, but after a day or two in chilly conditions it’s about the best-tasting stuff in the world. A word of warning: I usually choke down one cake of this stuff a day for a week before heading out, to give my body a chance to adjust to all that fat; a case of the runs I do NOT need on the trail. (Borge Ousland reportedly drank a cup of olive oil every day for a year before his 1995 solo attempt at the South Pole, with the same theory in mind. He also dragged truck tires behind him on his training runs though the woods. He’s a dedicated kind of guy.)
GLOP: a good place for your pemmican. "Glop" is a blanket term, as "gorp" has become, to describe a thick sort of one-pot meal, usually made with some flavoring base (like soup mix), some protein source (tuna, corned beef), and some carbohydrate source (rice, mashed potatoes), all boiled together. I hate to cook in the field -- well, I hate to clean, anyway, which precludes cooking -- so I’m a big fan of glop. There’s no wrong way to make it, outside of adding too little water and scorching it, and no right or wrong ingredients. It doesn’t always taste great, but if it tasted better it’d have a better name.
OATMEAL: Oatmeal is miracle food. It keeps me going like nothing else I’ve found. Starting the day with a couple of bowls of oatmeal always gets me fired and provides quick, clean carbo-energy for hours. This is a classic case of a food I do not eat for the taste. I like to add dehydrated fruit (wrap the pot up in your sleeping bag and let it sit for a few minutes after adding the water), and sometimes peanut butter. (Ed. note: no, I am not heir to an oatmeal fortune.)
PEANUT BUTTER: I read a quote from a guy (I can’t remember who) who said: "You can go a long way on fat and sugar." Peanut butter fits that bill (unless you buy the sugarless kind, which would screw up the logic of this paragraph) with the added benefit of protein. The trick is dispensing it when it’s frozen. Good luck.
CHOCOLATE: See quote in "Peanut Butter", above. This presents no dispensing trouble when frozen, however it can be a tooth-cracker. Thaw slightly before eating.
NUTS: Fats again (Hmm... I see a trend). If you buy the salted kind, you help replace salts you lost through sweating. And it’s nice to have something crunchy on hand when you’re on a steady diet of oatmeal and glop.
DRIED FRUIT: I suppose this has some health benefits, but frankly I carry it mostly as a morale-booster, especially when I have warm-weather fruits like papaya. Plus you can carry a variety of dried fruit in a minimum of space, which gives you a feeling of having a broader menu.
COOKING:
STOVE: You’ll need to carry a stove. A one-burner camping stove is good for one or two people. If you’re pulling a sled, you may want to opt for a two-burner camp stove - like a Coleman stove - or even a wood-burning sheepherder’s stove, if your tent is equipped to handle one. Be careful with stove fuel, because spilling it on your skin in cold weather can cause instant frostbite.
COOKSET: A simple cookset will usually do (and save on the dishes). Pot: big enough to whip up noodles & pemmican
Teapot: at least 1-liter capacity and wide top opening for melting snow
Bowl(s): if desired; not needed if you’re solo or with a friend
Spoon(s): anything you can do with a fork, you can do with a spoon
Insulated Travel Mug(s): keeps drinks/soup/oatmeal hot
Don’t grab metal cookware/utensils barehanded without warming them up - and don’t pop a cold metal spoon in your mouth unless you want your skin to be stuck to it.
VACUUM BOTTLE: I got a vacuum bottle as a present before heading out for a Christmas trip, and lo and behold it was like a new world. No longer did I have to choose between digging out my stove at lunch or suffering through cold drinks and snacks. Now I could boil water at breakfast and it would still be painfully hot at lunch, and at the mid-afternoon cocoa break, and after I woke up from my post-cocoa-break nap, and (if there was any water left) be hot for a quick recharge before setting up camp in the afternoon. Plus, you can fill it after dinner and have hot water handy in case you wake up chilly in the wee hours and need a warm-up (not much flavor, but it’s hot).
My notes from that trip contain paragraphs of praise for the vacuum bottle. Extra weight? What extra weight? |
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